The MySQL NoSQL Wars: Can't we all just get along?

MySQL & NoSQL

2 April 1:20PM - 2:10PM @ Ballroom B

Experience level:

Intermediate

Duration:

50 minutes conference

Over the past several years, NoSQL databases have become a fundamental component of modern web architecture. These stripped-down simplified data-stores built for web-scale from the ground up have proven to be extremely useful, and are successfully deployed at virtually all of today's leading web companies. Many in the web community have heralded the arrival of NoSQL as the death of relational data-stores such as MySQL, but is this in fact the case?
As with all practical engineering problems, especially in distributed systems at web-scale, all design decisions come down to balancing tradeoffs. NoSQL stores trade transactions and ACID compliance for scalability and performance. While this tradeoff is indeed compelling, being able to leverage MySQL's transactions and indexing makes application development easier.
At Box, we have found that a balanced approach works best, and we are successfully running both MySQL and HBase in production. In this talk we'll cover why we chose to keep our core meta-data in MySQL, as well as dig into use cases where we have chosen to go with HBase, and found it to be successful. Finally, we'll discuss how we have been gradually evolving our database infrastructure over time, and some of the future directions we're aiming for.

Speakers

Tamar Bercovici is a Senior Engineering Manager at Box where she leads the Distributed Data Systems Team in scaling Box’s database architecture. Prior to Box, Tamar was an early-stage employee at XMPie (now a Xerox company). Tamar holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.